Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Small businesses are mad as hell over theway major credit card firms are implementing their tardy switch to European-style chipped credit cards to finally reduce fraud in the U.S. The transaction-clearing machines are expensive, don't eliminate fraud, and small merchants are now responsible for charges made on old-fashioned cards — charges banks used to eat. From CNN:

The grocery store owners point to something Visa CEO Charlie Scharf
told analysts in 2014: that Visa met "in a room" with fellow credit card
companies, trade groups, banks and select retailers to come up with a
plan. That astounded U.S. District Judge William Alsup, a former antitrust prosecutor, at a court hearing in September.
"It's remarkable ... you don't get many antitrust cases where the CEO
admitted they were 'in a room,'" he said, according to a court
transcript. "I did antitrust cases as a lawyer. I never saw anything
this good." On Friday, the judge issued an order allowing the
case to move forward. He said the case "raises a plausible and
reasonable suggestion of collusion" by the credit card industry, which
operated "in lockstep." According to the grocery store owners,
the industry eliminated free market competition by banding together to
impose uniform penalties. If they hadn't, any single credit card company
could have offered better terms.

Maynard (Bob "Gilligan's Island" Denver) slyly flashes a nipple to the CBS eye while trying to talk his best buddy Dobie Gillis (Dwayne Hick­man) into taking off all his clothes. Whoever said 1950s television was a vast waste­land obviously didn't know where to look.